Frank McNally: An Irishman’s Diary

Anyone who still thinks Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo should visit an exhibition now running in that town's Ecuries museum. It includes the classic portrait of Bonaparte Crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David, but not in the original form. No, like the rest of the exhibits, this is made of Lego bricks: 96,768 of them, assembled painstakingly over 200 hours.

And that’s not the biggest thing on show. There’s a model of Les Invalides, Napoleon’s final resting place: 274,000 bricks and 1,000 hours. Even his bicorne hat is the subject of an exhibit. The Duke of Wellington, meanwhile, is nowhere to be seen.

In fairness, as I heard a spokesman explain in apology to a group of British journalists, it’s a French exhibition. It was made to mark not this year’s bicentenary of Waterloo, but last year bicentenary of the death of Empress Josephine, and is now on tour.

Still, it’s yet another example of the cult that perseveres around Napoleon.

I put this to Wellington himself when we met, elsewhere in Waterloo. It was during an informal post-battle press conference at his headquarters, barely 12 hours after a large-scale re-enactment had confirmed the 1815 result.

And he was understandably pleased with the outcome. But when I showed him a copy of a local newspaper’s 200th anniversary supplement, which had Napoleon on the cover, he was unsurprised that the story wasn’t about him: “They’ve been doing that for years.”

The real Alan Larsen, a middle-aged New Zealander who has re-enacted battles all his adult life, was so convincing as the Duke that it was sometimes hard to tell whether it was the actor or the character (both of whom faced questions) who was speaking.

When he mentioned that his biggest triumph of the weekend was a successful marriage proposal to his lady friend, who was “from Aberdeenshire, of middling-to-good family”, I had to check the historic record to confirm that it was Larsen’s proposal, not Wellington’s.

And when asked where he was from, the actor answered as a bit of both men. Confirming that, like the duke himself, he was “not English”, he described himself was being born in “one of our colonies.”

His flexibility was in contrast with Napoleon, aka Paris lawyer Frank Samson. In a pre-battle briefing, he took questions in English via an interpreter. But when one British journalist asked how it felt to be taking part in a costumed re-enactment, he refused to depart from character. Replying with imperial hauteur, in French, he assured us his clothes were normal. It was we, he said, pointing at the press corps, who looked “bizarre”.

Sure enough, wandering around the French and Allied camps prior to the staged battle, you did feel out of place in modern fashions. It’s an extraordinary thing to watch thousands of people, unpaid volunteers all, dressed in meticulous period detail, living in tents and cooking on open fires, with not a camper van in sight.

And blank though the ammunition may be, it can be dangerous when the fighting starts, as Larsen knows. Back in 1986, as a young man, he was almost killed in an re-enactment in England. A rifleman who fired at him had inadvertently left the brass tip of a ramrod in the muzzle, effectively adding a bullet to the gunpowder.

It sliced through Larsen’s carotid artery and, when he fell forwards, those around him thought he was playing dead. Only when he was turned over minutes later, and a geyser of blood shot up, did he receive attention. Had there not been an ex-army doctor nearby, Larsen would not have survived to play the duke.

I didn’t hear of any real bullets in the Waterloo re-enactment. But as the pretend fighting began, and the fields in front of us gradually filled with smoke, real 21st-century stretcher bearers were soon emerging from it, carrying the genuinely injured away.

The site was barely visible by the time battle ended, nightfall now combining with the smoke. So it was all the more impressive afterwards to see the survivors marching out of the gloom in formation, still led by drummers, and adding to the traffic jams as 64,000 spectators also trooped home.

We were about to leave when a familiar figure on horseback trotted past the press gallery, causing a flurry of excitement.

“Any chance of a quick word, Emperor?” we shouted. He turned his mount around and, after thinking a moment, declared: “Je reviendrai.” With that, he rode off into the night.

@FrankmcnallyIT